Everybody talks about the Wi-Fi future. Cometa CEO Larry Brilliant is building it - with some help from three little outfits called IBM, Intel, and AT&T.

By Lucas Graves

Three years ago, while at the helm of the now-defunct Aerzone, Larry Brilliant burned through almost $100 million trying to construct a Wi-Fi network for the country's airports. At the end of 2000, he gave up, citing lack of demand. But things have since changed a great deal in the unwired world, and now Brilliant's back with a far more ambitious plan. As the head of Cometa Networks, he intends to build a 20,000-node nationwide Wi-Fi network - before 2007 is out.

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"Simply put, we will be the biggest provider of wholesale 802.11 bandwidth in the United States," Brilliant says from the company's San Francisco headquarters. "No place in the top 50 metro areas will be more than five minutes from an access point."

Cometa seemed to appear out of nowhere last December. Backed by AT&T, Intel, and IBM, the outfit had been percolating quietly under the code name Project Rainbow for the better part of a year. Its partners dropped $1 million to study the potential market for Wi-Fi and develop a business plan. "We spent nine months locked in a room with 40 full-time professionals," says Brilliant, who is Cometa's acting CEO until he can find someone to run things day-to-day. "There's hardly anyone in wireless we didn't talk to - and because of the companies involved, they all called us back."

Members of the research team knew they could count on PC manufacturers to begin including 802.11 gear as standard equipment in their new notebooks, which would jump-start demand. They also found that corporations were beginning to embrace the technology. The question was where to position Cometa. It needed to find users who would pay for access.

Cometa's plan calls for AT&T to build and operate the network, helping defray the massive infrastructure costs. IBM will handle backend billing systems, and Intel will provide capital as part of its pledge to invest $150 million in promising Wi-Fi ventures around the world. Additionally, Cometa will avoid the enormous cost of building a brand by acting exclusively as a wholesaler. It will supply bandwidth to service providers who in turn will act as resellers.

To the technology partners, the reasons to be involved with Cometa are obvious. Intel's Wi-Fi chipsets get a boost in demand. AT&T adds another flavor of network to its menu, and IBM's Global Services arm gets to turn its corporate clients on to a whole new technology.

Of course, even with Cometa's blue-chip backers, there's no guarantee that the plan will work. There's been a conspicuous lack of interest in paid Wi-Fi service so far. Underwhelming demand has already claimed at least three early Wi-Fi service providers, and others - Boingo and Wayport - have run into similar trouble building their subscriber base. T-Mobile runs the biggest subscription 802.11 network anywhere, with more than 2,000 nodes around the country, mostly in Starbucks cafés.

But like T-Mobile, some of Cometa's stiffest competition comes from the free networks popping up like daisies after a spring rain. Public Wi-Fi experiments in cities from Barcelona to Long Beach have shown that it can cost just a few thousand dollars to set up a free network.

As independent tech vendors emerge with security solutions for these free networks, Cometa could have a hard time convincing anyone they should pay for access.

Yet these issues don't concern Brilliant nearly as much as the company's core challenge: a massive landgrab. The b-school mantra that fast-food chains are actually in the real estate business applies to Cometa also; success depends on properly locating access points. And it has to be everywhere before it can sell anywhere. "We can't say we're in 60 percent of Hyatts. We have to say we're in all of them," Brilliant explains of his effort to recruit resellers. "No one's going to buy a nationwide, all-you-can-eat model before you've got 20,000 nodes."

One of the most interesting aspects of Cometa's strategy is its target market - not executives jetting from JFK to SFO, but "windshield warriors," the insurance and pharmaceutical salespeople who roam their districts in wrinkled suits and midsize sedans. Researchers say the market for "mobile field sales applications and services" will grow eightfold, to $1 billion, over the next four years.

With secure network access from a parking lot or even a gas station, these salespeople could use time between meetings to catch up on email, file reports, and update accounts - meaning more sales calls and fewer hours in front of the computer once they get home. "Windshield warriors don't go to hotels or to airports, they go to McDonald's," says Dean Douglas, an IBM vice president who has worked for Cometa from its inception. "They have a lot of dead time, but they're not in a place where they can immediately go and do some work." And so, naturally, Cometa plans to roll out hot spots under the golden arches, too.

After his Aerzone failure, Brilliant naturally wants Cometa to be a great commercial success. But if not, the company can count victory by achieving its backers' main aims: creating a critical mass of hot spots, making public Wi-Fi practical, and driving mainstream consumer demand. That's great for Cometa's partners, but it would also thrill other companies across the technology industry, making Wi-Fi the next big thing Silicon Valley so desperately needs.

Lucas Graves (lucasgrv@yahoo.com) is a freelance writer living in New York City.